1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus, and more specifically, relates to a printing apparatus that is able to apply light-blocking ink and metallic ink on a printing medium.
2. Related Art
In recent years, printing apparatuses, particularly printing techniques such as printers that print image data that is processed by a computer have been showing signs of diversifying beyond the confines of mere color printing. A printing technique using metallic ink is one such example. For example, a technique of forming a light-blocking layer for performing printing on a transparent printing medium (JP-A-2001-001560), a technique of dividing nozzle rows that are included on a print head of a printing apparatus into a first half and a second half, printing metallic ink with the first half portions of the nozzle rows as a ground color layer, and printing a color image with the second half portions of the nozzle rows (JP-A-2007-50555), and the like are known.
However, with a printing apparatus of the related art, in a case when a metallic look is imparted to a print image by metallic ink, it was difficult to control the degree of the metallic look. Problems have been identified in which in a case when the metallic look is controlled by the dot recording rate of the metallic ink that is applied on a printing medium, if the dot recording rate of the metallic ink is lowered in order to tone down the metallic look, the granularity stands out such that the dots of the metallic ink become observable, and further, in a case when the printing medium is light-transmissive, the light transmissivity of the print image increases and the opacity decreases.